


Be My Angel

by fid_gin



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 00:04:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6172084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fid_gin/pseuds/fid_gin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/4042159">Getting Clean in Dangerous Waters</a>; Beth confronts Daryl, so to speak, about what happened between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Be My Angel

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't going to do a sequel, but I couldn't just leave them like that. Song lyrics quoted within and title of fic borrowed without permission from Mazzy Star, because you KNOW Beth would sing the hell out of some Mazzy Star

It isn’t always toil and misery. Occasionally, they remember how to be human, remember Joy.

This, however, isn’t one of those times. This is a hide-and-keep-quiet-if-you-want-to-live time. Crammed in their tiny, hot closet, belly to belly, Beth stares at the small hollow at the bottom of Daryl’s throat and the grey hairs sprinkled through his beard, and thinks about how she _should_ like those other times better. She should, but she’s not sure she DOES.

Sometimes they swim in lakes, and she splashes Daryl and he looks her over for leeches afterward. Or they swap stories: farm life and high school and horseback riding from her, hunting and fighting and foraging from him. Once they found a six pack of beer someone left to cool in a creek before, and they split it next to a campfire. Daryl’d produced a bag of marshmallows he scavenged that he was saving, and they toasted them and drank and ate blackened sugar and could have been any two normal people camping under the stars. Another time they’d found a guitar with most of its strings, and Beth strummed it and sang him an old song she remembered from one of Maggie’s CD’s, careful not to look him in the eye as she did so. _”They say it’s me who makes you do things you might not have done if I was away, and that it’s me who likes to talk to you and watches you as you walk away…”_

They’ve never talked about That Night; Beth thinks maybe they never will. It was just one of those things, she guesses, and they don’t have to face it, to face each _other_ , out here when they’re too busy surviving. What they were in the funeral home was…something else. A rest. A deep breath. A diversion. A damn romance novel, as Daryl might say.

In this abandoned house they ran into, Beth now listens to yet another herd of walkers snarl their way around and through the building as they cower in their cramped quarters – even more cramped, perhaps, than the trunk of that car that time. She stares somewhere around the vicinity of Daryl’s chin and thinks desperate thoughts, mostly that if they’re screwed this time she doesn’t want to die without at least acknowledging that _something_ happened in the warm, wet pause in the insanity of their lives that was a handjob in a bathtub by candlelight. She’s spent the weeks since then half-wondering if she dreamed the whole thing.

“Daryl.” A barely-there whisper-breath.

“Shut up,” he hisses back at her, his head cocked, listening to the walkers stumbling around outside, clumsy and carnivorous monsters bumping into each other and overturning furniture. Eventually they’ll get bored and leave, but that could be hours. She’ll be damned if she’ll stand here for hours with her body pressed against Daryl’s and her lips centimeters from his and Shambling Death just outside the door, and not DO something.

So just like before, she takes a page from his book, takes action, and goes up on tiptoe and kisses him right on the mouth, soft and quick and quiet.

He looks too shocked to be angry for a second, then: “Beth, what the _hell_?” Louder than a whisper, and he glances nervously at the door of their closet after he says it.

“Oh like _you_ haven’t thought about…” she starts, but he bends down and silences her with a kiss of his own tasting of tobacco and sweet campfire smoke, and his arms encircle her waist as hers wind around his neck. 

When he breaks the kiss, rests his forehead against hers, his breath is warm on her face. “You got some kinda timing, girl.”

“Always did,” she answers, enjoying being able to trace her fingers over the smoothe muscles of his shoulders and the leather wings on the back of his jacket, thinking of that song she sang him again. _”Just be my angel if you love me, be my angel in the night.”_

It plays in her head as they kiss some more and he lifts her like she weighs nothing, even though he told her different back at the funeral home. Her legs go around him and he doesn’t _slam_ her against the closet wall but sort-of _places_ her against it and then _pins_ her there, pushes forward against her with his hips so that she can feel every hard inch of him against the seam of the crotch of her jeans. There’s a crash from somewhere in the house and, startled, they come up for air.

“What now?” She chews on her bottom lip and Daryl stares at it like he’d like to do the same thing.

“We try to keep quiet,” he growls, and thank God he’s holding her or her knees would probably give out.

If you were to ask Beth later how they navigate the closet and their proximity within it to remove just enough clothing to do what they’re gonna do, she couldn’t tell you, but they do. Oddly, Daryl talks a lot between kisses, almost _pained_ -sounding mumbles that he wasn’t gonna, he didn’t mean to ever do this, he tried, he _tried_ not to because she deserves better, and she whispers to him that that’s bullshit. He’s everything she never knew she needed, he’s her hero, he’s Robin Hood, he’s the Beatles, he’s a saviour. She doesn’t say all that, but she thinks it.

The combination of danger and Daryl have got her so close to the edge before they even start, but when he’s inside her suddenly she feels safer than she has in months, years maybe, and _that’s_ what she comes to, way too quickly, realizing what a challenge it is to actually keep quiet as she bites back a squeal. Despite the risk, this thing happening between them, it couldn’t have happened any other way - she knew even back in the bath that it would be dirty and quick when it happened because that’s their lives, now. But life and, it turns out, even sex can still be beautiful, beautiful just like Daryl when he clutches her to him and shudders as she feels him pulsing inside of her.

They weren’t quiet enough it turns out, and he’s barely relaxing against her and softening inside her before the scrabbling of splintered fingernails against their door brings them back to reality. Daryl sets her down gingerly, retrieves a knife from his unzipped pants and cracks the closet door enough to confirm “Just one.” Then he throws open the door and plants his knife in the forehead of the walker outside that’s little more than a skeleton. It goes down silently as he turns back to her, holds a finger up to his lips and nods down at the pile of her jeans pooled on the floor. _Jesus_ , she thinks. _How can that be so sexy?_

It isn’t always toil and misery - occasionally, they remember Joy. But truthfully, Beth _prefers_ the toil and the misery because those are the moments that remind her that “love” isn’t always necessarily thunderbolts and music and flowers and bows and arrows…well, not Cupid’s, anyway. Sometimes love is watching the redneck who’s saved your life many times kick a dead body out the way before taking your hand to guide you out the closet he just fucked you in. She’ll take the latter any day.


End file.
